Amy Lawrence, FEELFEELFEEL Residency, February 2021
FEELFEELFEEL is Amy Lawrence‘s messy scrapbook of manipulated physical interactions with suburban woodland and park spaces just outside of Manchester City centre.
An interrogation of wildness, blackness and greenness and what it means to be a woman and performative body in these spaces. An ode to Ingrid Pollard’s Pastoral Interlude (1988) and a documentation of Amy’s last weeks in the North West of England before moving to Scotland.
Amy used this remote residency as a way to consider the surveillance of whiteness in these ‘wild’ spaces and the vulnerability and freedom within the confines of a locked-down city in 2020. Using video, movement/gesture, and poses she archived roughly a series of interactions both real and digitally generated.
Amy collaborated with filmmaker SKOWT on two of the day-long explorations in which they spent time in a semi-rural space documenting sections of the wild using greenscreen, performing with the space, watching and being watched, considering what it means to ramble performatively through the countryside.
The video series uses removal, replacing, texture, and sensitivity to investigate interior and exterior expressions of wildness through the body culminating in lots of images curated into a looping video series. FEELFEELFEEL feels like an overflowing collection of documentation, Amy takes the elements and sections of the constructed ‘wild’ space home so she might create a version of existing here. The residency work is visualised as a looping scrapbook to be viewed in the form of 3 short video vignettes using experimental approaches to filming and ‘mining’ for content and an outcome.
FEELFEELFEEL is also a note home to England.
Amy hosted a Sunday Supplement on Sunday 28 February to share her work.
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To adjust your preferencesI am in the middle of a woodland, all body, yelling my guts out.
Hair long and twisted- embedded in tree trunks – my fingers tickle wet moss like the ends of washed hair. I’m unsteady on mounds of soil and unprotected, breeze all over, poking holes in flesh and wrapping around painful teeth. Eyelashes soggy and bleeding on brown flecked with pink cheeks and peeing behind prickly male holly, bitten by dogs and dragging my face across slimy mahogany as walkers with socks in boots and fashionable dogs glide through. Standing up on the peak of a sheer drop looking across tree trunk against tree trunk.
Self evident 1995 Ingrid Pollard – descriptions.
Leaning against a tree wearing a yellow coat with red flowers surrounded with trunks of trees. Standing in grass holding sticks wearing a suit, wearing a long pale green dress and holding a large shell to an ear. Half green and half blue horizon, holding open a fleshy watermelon.
This is the last time I’ll speak to you about this.
This is my fist time sticking my feet into a muddy puddle, half dressed.
I submerged myself into the water of that river and my heart almost stopped, and a breath-in lasted and croaked until it pushed out. I got a splinter which stayed in me for days till I noticed it. I slipped when I was falling up a flat woodland surface and bounced on wet green moss. I pressed my hand into that forrest green foliage and it bounced right back into my face… I got bitten by a dog and saw identical women walking identical animals. When I was dragging my face softly across mahogany a droplet with a fly inside dripped straight into my eye.
